“Armor-piercing!” he shouted to the foot soldiers he’d dragooned into his service.
“Which ones are those, sir?” one of them asked.
“Shit,” Fletch said. But he said it under his breath; it wasn’t the infantrymen’s fault that they didn’t know one kind of round from another. “The ones with the black tips. Shake a leg, guys, or that son of a bitch is going to-”
That son of a bitch did start shooting first. Fletch and his makeshift crew threw themselves flat. Fragments of sharp, hot steel snarled overheard. Standing up while you were getting shelled was asking to get torn to pieces. Sometimes you had to, but you never wanted to.
An American machine gun opened up on the tank. For all the good their bullets did, the soldiers at the gun might as well have thrown marshmallows at the Japanese machine. A tank that wasn’t armored against machine-gun fire had no raison d’etre.
“French, yet,” Fletch muttered. But the machine gun did do one thing: it distracted the Japs in the tank from the distant artillery piece to the annoyance right at hand. Fletch didn’t know if that was what the machine gunners had had in mind. He doubted it, as a matter of fact. But it let him get to his feet and yell till his crew did the same. “Come on, you bastards! They’ve given us a chance. They’re human, by God! They can make mistakes, just like us.”
The Japs hadn’t made very many, damn them. By sheer dumb luck, the tank wasn’t very far from the line on which the 105 pointed. Fletch swung the barrel to bear on it. Range was about seven hundred yards. He turned the altitude screw. The muzzle lowered, ever so slightly. “Fire!” he shouted.
The gun roared. Flame shot from the muzzle. The shell kicked up dirt in front of the tank and a little to the left. “Short!” one of the infantrymen shouted-they were starting to learn the ropes.
Now-had the Japs seen the shot? Fletch didn’t think so. They went on banging away at the machine gun. “Armor-piercing again!” he said. “Quick, goddammit!” As the shell went into the breech, he corrected his aim-or hoped he did. The tank wasn’t going very fast, but this gun wasn’t made for hitting any kind of moving target. He’d already seen that. “Fire!”
Boom! The 105 went off again. The foot soldiers who served it flinched. They usually remembered to cover their ears, but they didn’t know opening their mouths helped at least as much when it came to beating an artillery piece’s noise.
But then they started making noise of their own, screaming, “Hit! Hit! Jesus God, that’s a hit!” and, “You nailed that fucker, Lieutenant! Nailed his ass good!”
Fletch didn’t think any tank in the world, U.S., British, German, or Russian, could stand up to a 105mm AP round. This Japanese hunk of tin didn’t have a prayer. He couldn’t have aimed it better if he’d had the most highly trained crew in the world and tried for a week. It struck home right at the join between hull and turret, and blew the turret clean off the tank and a good six feet in the air. Ammo in the turret started cooking off, while the hull erupted in a fireball. The crew never had a chance, not that Fletch wasted much grief on them.
“You see how that Jap tank tipped his hat to our gun?” one of the infantrymen yelled.
Fletch laughed his head off. It was a pretty good line, and all the better because it came from somebody so raw. But that wasn’t the only reason. He felt giddy, almost drunk, with relief. The odds had favored the tank, not him. All he had to protect him from fragments was a flimsy shield. He’d had to be dead accurate to kill before he got killed-and he’d done it.
And, as far as he could tell, doing it did neither him nor the American position one damn bit of good. A couple of hours later, he got the order to fall back to the outskirts of Wahiawa. The Army would try to make another stand there.
OSCAR VAN DER KIRK’s life swayed back and forth between something approaching normality and something approaching insanity. Some of the tourists the war had stuck on Oahu still wanted surf-riding lessons. He gave them what they wanted. Why not? He needed to pay his rent just like anybody else. His landlord, a skinflint Jap named Mas Fukumoto, would have flung his scanty belongings out in the street the day after he failed to pay.
He’d had the crummy little apartment on Lewers Street for a couple of years now, after getting the heave-ho from another place much like it. All that time, of course, he’d known Mas Fukumoto was a Jap. He’d known Fukumoto was a skinflint, too. As a matter of fact, he’d never known a landlord who wasn’t a skinflint. The one who’d tossed him out when he got behind was Irish as Paddy’s pig.
But to think of Mas Fukumoto as a skinflint Jap now was to think of him as an enemy-as the enemy-in a way it hadn’t been before December 7. Oscar didn’t know Fukumoto wasn’t loyal to the United States. He had no reason to believe his landlord wasn’t, in fact. That didn’t keep him-and a lot of Fukumoto’s other haole tenants-from giving the man a fishy stare whenever they saw him.
And even when Oscar paddled out into the Pacific-warm despite its being the week before Christmas-with a wahine from Denver or Des Moines, he couldn’t help seeing and smelling the black, stinking smoke that still rose from the Navy’s shattered fuel tanks at Pearl Harbor.
The wahines mostly didn’t care. They’d come to Hawaii to forget whatever ailed them on the mainland. They intended to go right on forgetting, too. And when they couldn’t forget, they said things like, “Well, but that’s all going on way up there. Everything’s pretty much okay down here in Waikiki and Honolulu, right?”
That was a strawberry blonde named Susie. She’d come to Hawaii from Reno to forget about a recently ex-husband, and she was doing quite a job of it, too. She was ready for any kind of lessons Oscar wanted to give her. He had a sure instinct about such things.
He wondered if saying something would mess up his chances. Lying there on the surfboard with her, he shrugged a tiny shrug. She wasn’t the only fish in the sea. He said, “Wahiawa’s only half an hour away. The north coast is only an hour away-a buddy of mine and I were surf-riding up there when the Japs landed. They were shooting at us.”
Susie looked back over her slightly sunburned shoulder at him. Her eyes were blue as a Siamese cat’s. “What was that like?” she asked.
When the bullets started flying back and forth, I pissed myself. Nobody but me’ll ever know, because I was dripping wet anyway, but I damn well did. “Not a whole lot of fun,” he answered out loud, which was not only true but sounded tough and not the least bit undignified. He wondered if the same thing had happened to Charlie Kaapu. No way to ask, not ever.
What he said seemed to satisfy Susie. She made a little noise, almost a purr, down deep in her throat. “I’m glad they missed,” she told him.
“Me, too,” Oscar said, and she laughed. If he lowered his chin a couple of inches, it would come down on her cotton-covered backside. He decided not to. Unlike some of the women to whom he gave lessons, Susie didn’t need much in the way of signals. He paddled out a little while longer (so did she, not very helpfully), then swung the surfboard back toward the beach. “This time, we’re going to get you up on your knees on the board, okay?”
“What happens if I fall off?” she asked.
“You swim,” he answered, and she laughed. He started paddling shoreward. “Come on. You can do it. I’ll steady you.” And he did, kneeling behind her with his hands on her slim waist. That was a signal of sorts, but it was also line of duty, and she could ignore it if she wanted to. She laughed again. She wasn’t ignoring anything-except the Japs. Oscar wished he could do the same.
Actually, her sense of balance was pretty good-plenty good enough to keep her kneeling on the board with only a little support. The surf wasn’t very big-Oscar had chosen this place with care. But she got enough of the roller-coaster thrill to let out a whoop as they neared the beach.